What is The Shape of Water about? Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer and Michael Shannon star in Oscar nominated movie
The Shape of Water instantly gained critical acclaim when it was debuted at Toronto International Film Festival in 2017 and it has become one of the most talked about films during the 2018 award season.
From the mind of Guillermo del Toro, the director who treated movie goers to films such as Pan’s Labyrinth and Hell Boy, the surreal adult fairy tale flick has been leaving its mark on audiences across the globe.
The film has already scooped the Best Director and Best Original Score awards at the Golden Globes and it bagged the top gong at the Producers Guild Awards. It’s up for 12 BAFTA award nominations and is expected to bag even more trophies at the Oscars with a stomping 13 nominations – becoming only the 6th film ever nominated in all of the technical categories.
But what is all the fuss about?
(Picture: Twentieth Century Fox)
What’s the plot?
The supernatural thriller tells the story of a mute woman, Eliza Esposito, who strikes up a friendship with a mysterious underwater creature who is being held at a government laboratory where she works in 1960s America.
The two of them form a bond after Eliza, who is a cleaner, begins to communicate with the creature who was discovered in South America.
Each day, Eliza brings him food and the story follows their unique relationship as she tries to discover what is set to happen to him.
Who stars in it?
Sally Hawkins plays Eliza and is most famous for her roles in Blue Jasmine, Vera Drake, Paddington and Happy-Go-Lucky. The actress stars alongside Richard Jenkins (Burn After reading), who plays her older neighbour with his own personal issues.
Her colleague and friend Zelda Fuller is played by Hidden Figures star Octavia Spencer while Michael Shannon (Pearl Harbour) plays hostile Colonel Strickland.
The film uses practical effects rather than CGI with the creature played by frequent del Toro collaborator Doug Jones. The pair have previously worked together on Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy and Crimson Peak.
What have they been saying about it?
del Toro himself described the film to GoldDerby as: “A sort of a simple story. It’s a fable, a fairy tale for troubled times about a woman that falls in love with a creature, an amphibian man, and she’s a cleaner in a secret government facility during the Cold War, 1962, and the plot is simple so that we can then make the characters complex and the interactions thematic weight and we have a lot of fun with it.
“It’s a movie that mixes thriller, musical, drama, melodrama, creature. It’s a gorgeous sort of movie that is in love with love and in love with cinema.”
Sally Hawkins revealed she was thrilled to discover del Toro wrote the part specifically for her.
She told Rolling Stone: “I just got goosebumps and nearly fell off the chair. I said, ‘I don’t need to read a script, it’s Guillermo del Toro. Whatever it is, it sounds amazing.'”
More: Guillermo Del Toro
And she wasn’t disappointed as she read the script as she added: “I was surprised at how poignant and beautiful the material was. It seemed to be rephrasing something very deep in her. As a writer, you recognize when a piece of material hurts.”
While Octavia admitted she loved the fact that her character doesn’t have to discuss her race in the film despite her character working in a mainly white workplace.
She told AARP magazine: “As crazy as this will sound, that was quite refreshing for me, to not have to talk about my race.”
Is it out in cinemas yet?
Shape of Water is set to be released in the UK on 14 February, 2018.
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